Tag Archives: kfc

It’s been over three years since our last KFC update, but happily this time the news is so good you might be tempted to lick your fingers!

Super Chinese search engine Baidu has partnered with the Louisville-based fowl giant Kentucky Fried Chicken to trial a new “smart restaurant” in Beijing. The smart bit is that the restaurant has terminals which use face recognition software to suggest a choice of meal, based on the customer’s age, gender and mood. A worked example might be as follows: “Hi – you appear to be a 47 year old man who is disillusioned with the state of the world in 2017 – have a family bargain bucket!”

However, disappointed fast food enthusiast and former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Buckethead (pictured) is reported as saying that the face recognition terminals “simply do not work”.

65 years after KFC first opened its doors, the identity of the 11 herbs and spices that go into founder Colonel Harland Sanders’ “original recipe” coating remains a matter of intense speculation . However, if I had to guess, I would go for salt, black pepper, white pepper, celery salt, garlic salt, thyme, basil, oregano, dried mustard, paprika and ground ginger.

Something everybody knew, but would probably have preferred not to have had confirmed, has been confirmed by CCTV this week.

That something is that if you plan on grabbing a drink at KFC in Beijing, you would be 13 times better off filling your own ice tray from a public loo, freezing the cubes at home, and taking the cubes along to KFC, than lumping for KFC’s own ice cubes. Ok, let’s say ten times better off (less convenient).

Not bothered

OK, here comes the science bit – a Beijing KFC’s ice cubes were reported to contain 900 colony-forming units (CFU) of bacteria per millilitre. That is 13 times more than toilet water and more than 20 times the national limit (though to my mind 45 CFUs per millilitre doesn’t sound that healthy either).

However rest assured that shrimp flavoured potato chips have been given the all clear.